International Press Release May 30th #2

Google today, Finland tomorrow. French official Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin will take a break from fighting international privacy battles to come to Finland and build a better data future

CNIL’s president and the chairman of the European Commission Article 29 Working Party Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin is going to speak at the MyData 2016 conference in Helsinki Aug 31st – Sep 2nd.

Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin is the latest European official to sign on to speak at the MyData 2016 conference in Helsinki. She is the president of CNIL (Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés), a French organisation that fights for privacy rights online, and the chairman of the European Commission Article 29 Working Party, which monitors and enforces personal data protection at the EU level. The Art. 29 Working party recently came out with a review of the EU-US Privacy Shield that was harshly critical of lack of protections against the massive and indiscriminate collection of Europeans’ data by U.S. intelligence agencies.

Just last week Google filed an appeal to get out of the 100,000 € fine that CNIL imposed on them for insufficiently complying with EU’s “right to be forgotten” requirements. In order to comply with the European Court of Justice’s ruling that Europeans have a right to have certain personal information delisted from Google’s search engines, Google started de-indexing links from their search engines in country-specific domains, such as google.fr or goodle.pt. CNIL imposed the fine in order to force Google to extend the delistings to all of Google’s domains, including google.com. Google is now trying to appeal the fine under the justifications that a country’s local privacy laws should not be applied globally.

CNIL is holding its ground, issuing a response that stated: “it simply removes any links to website pages from the list of search results generated by running a search on the person’s first name and surname. These pages can still be accessed when the search is performed using other terms.”

In an interview with Wired, Isabelle said that the fine was a matter of principle, maintaining that delisting is an important tool for balancing the relationship between a data subject and the data industry. Its purpose is to make give us increased control over our reputation online, countering the public’s ability to find information about us with our ability to hide it. She wants to see privacy rights become the default, not an option.

Other recently-confirmed MyData 2016 speakers include:

MyData 2016 is an international conference on personal data management that will be held in Helsinki, Finland from August 31st August to September 2nd. The event is hosted by Open Knowledge Finland, Fing (Next-Generation Internet Foundation), Aalto University, and Finland’s Ministry for Transport and Communications.